Drew Hayes back as operations director at WLS-AM

"The vision for the station is what WLS is, only we're going to turn up the volume," said Hayes, who was named to his new position Tuesday by recently promoted WLS-AM and FM chief Michael Damsky and starts Monday. "I don't feel nostalgic about it. I'm looking forward because I see what the station is and what it can be. ... The station has been great for a long time, and I see it as only being bigger in the future."

"We need to be more urgent," Damsky had said last week after moving Shomper out, adding that he thought the station had "all the pieces. We're just not getting the most out of them. I feel like in some cases, we could be making better decisions, better choices."

A native New Yorker, Hayes first made a name for himself in Chicago from 1986 to 1988 as a talk-show host at the late WMAQ-AM. He left to program a station in Cincinnati but then-station boss Tom Tradup brought him back to town as program director at WLS-AM, launching its talk format in August of 1989 and Hayes eventually became its operations director.

Hayes left WLS-AM and Chicago in 1996 for the ESPN Radio Network in Bristol, Conn., where he was general manager, later becoming program director and operations manager at Los Angeles' KABC-AM. He returned to Chicago yet again in 2001, however, serving CBS Radio in a variety of capacities at the late WCKG-FM, WBBM-AM and at WSCR.

About this blog

This is an expansion of the Chicago Tribune column I have written since April 2005, and the columns I wrote for the Chicago Sun-Times and Los Angeles’ Daily News for two decades before that. It’s TV, radio, newspapers and whatever, both locally and nationally. Beyond sharing what crosses my desk—and my mind—this will be a venue for you to share your takes with me as well as with each other. About Phil Rosenthal